Reversing QAnon: Trump Wags a Rabid Dog; Gets Bit
“The famous QAnon… is turning away from him.”
After six months of paving the way for Russia’s mass terrorism against Ukrainian civilians, embattled American despot Donald Trump now says he is “unhappy with Putin” and “considering” sanctions—and will sell weapons to NATO for Ukraine. This reversal has been brewing for several weeks, but burst out into a full-scale psy-war today when Trump used the Oval Office to announce how upset he suddenly is.
The uproar in MAGA over DOJ, FBI and Trump embarrassingly hiding information about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes from the public is serious and growing. So Trump is desperately trying to create a new strongman narrative against Putin to wag the dog to distract from his Epstein problems.
“Wag the dog” is a political idiom that refers to a situation where a leader or government creates a distraction—often a military conflict or dramatic event—to divert public attention from a scandal or domestic problem.
The problem with Trump’s plan is that this particular Russian dog is rabid. If you pull its tail, you will get bit, every time.
In the White House today, Trump seemed sincerely befuddled that someone he had relied on for so many years, Vladimir Putin, was not giving him the “peace deal in 24 hours” Trump promised. Along with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who deftly played along, and a roomful of his top sycophants, Trump tried to muster up some critical words for Putin while giving another arbitrary 50-day deadline extension for “negotiations”—before imposing any sanctions.
Asked how he delivered this news to Putin, Trump said:
I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done. And I always hang up and say, well, there was a nice phone call, and then missiles launched into Kiev or some other city, and it's strange. And after that happens, three or four times you say, "The talk doesn't mean anything." My conversations with him are always very pleasant, I say. He's got a very lovely conversation, and then the missiles go off that night. I go home, I tell the first lady, and I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation. She said, "Oh, really? Another city was just hit."
So it's like -- look, he's -- I don't want to say he's an assassin, but he's a tough guy. It's been proven over the years. He's fooled a lot of people. He's fooled Bush. He's fooled a lot of people. He's fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama. Biden. He didn’t fool me.
The good news about this is that Ukraine will get some Patriot air defense batteries now that Trump is finally allowing some weapons to be sold into Ukraine via NATO. Incredibly, however, after saying Putin deceived him for months, Trump claims Putin has “fooled a lot of people…. [but] he didn’t fool me.” Really, Donald?
Admitting fault of any kind is psychologically impossible for narcissists, especially if they are in collapse.
Regardless, Trump’s new attitude has not been well received by the Russians who, in a stunning admission, say that “the famous QAnon… is turning away from him.”
He used to attempt to act like a respectable figure, but now he is not even trying. Why is he not trying? Because his situation is critical. All that is happening to Trump for the last 2 weeks is an indicator of a drastic escalation, it’s not catastrophic yet, but it’s a drastic escalation of a domestic situation, of an internal struggle. Turns out, quite a large coalition is against him. It includes the right wingers, including those right wingers that supported him.
There are very interesting tendencies taking place in the famous QAnon that was fully behind him and was the foundation of his pre-electoral network. Now it is turning away from him. It also includes the left and radical left, and even Tucker Carlson who joined them is also against him, as it turns out.
Who is for him? Turns out, not that many people are on his side.
[Source: Julia Davis News, Youtube]
Fact check: Mostly True.
As I’ve written, if there is one issue that has defined the MAGA-QAnon movement over the last decade, it’s “Save the Children”—which in this context always means “saved from child-traffickers and pedophiles who happen to be Democrats.”
From Pizzagate, to QAnon, to the hysteria over “Drag Queen Story Hour,” it has been a staple of right-wing psyops to weaponize kids into their conspiracy theories. The reason for this is dark but simple: Invoking child sexual abuse is one way to generate the kind of psychological trauma needed to brainwash people.
But while the Trump regime’s bumbling over Epstein was already creating real cracks in MAGA-QAnon, now he has pissed off Putin, one of Trump’s most important geopolitical allies—an ally instrumental to both creating and maintaining Pizzagate and QAnon for a decade.
Mike Flynn, as I have been reporting for nearly five years, is the person who curated the “Q” persona from the beginning, and he raised millions of dollars from it personally. But the network of Q promoters are also uniformly pro-Putin for a reason. As we know, the Russians pay Americans to spread narratives favorable to Putin and his goals. Trump has been a beneficiary of this, but he is not immune to it if turned in his direction.


So when Russian state media asserts that QAnon is “turning on Trump” and “Q” himself chimes in to agree, along with a host of MAGA-QAnon promoters and Russian propagandists, we have a unique situation that is playing out right in front of us.
People who have supported Trump for many years are now being forced to give up two of their most sacred ideological tenets at the same time—if they want to stay in his good graces.
Thou shalt expose pedophiles.
Thou shalt never criticize Vladimir Putin.
It’s not going over well. The howling from the MAGA core over this is real, like a primal scream as their conspiracy theories are shattered, and they are forced to face the fact that they’ve been lied to for many years. Or, just that it’s bad for their brand. Regardless, this type of activity has been constant on the former Twitter for days now.
To further complicate this for Trump, his largest American benefactor, Elon Musk, continues to drive the Epstein narrative as he proposes the third-positionist “America Party.” Among the biggest cheerleaders of this idea is “Putin’s Brain” Aleksandr Dugin, once Trump’s biggest Russian fan, who is now openly taking sides and trying to take MAGA out of Trump’s hands and give it to Musk.
In short, Dugin, Musk and the Russians at large are reversing QAnon on Trump.
Trump swore repeatedly that he would publish the complete Epstein files: documents containing evidence of pedophilia and ritual orgies involving the previously mentioned liberal American political elite. Yet now he claims no such files exist, and therefore no such orgies ever took place. Before our eyes, Trump is transforming from the leader of MAGA into a standard Republican. He now spends more and more time with radical Russophobe Senator Lindsey Graham, and he stands less and less for the ideas that got him elected.
MAGA is in despair. Here comes Elon Musk, a highly pragmatic political actor. Consider how many billions he has and how many Trump has. Musk has nearly 400 billion, Trump around five. In a country like America, where money carries enormous, almost divine, significance, Musk is eighty times more of a “god” than Trump.
There are a lot of overlapping motivations here, a matrix of MICE—Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego—that drive these different people to believe they have the right to conspire together to lie, cheat and steal their way into power. But as they flip the script on Trump, it will create an opportunity. When you shine the light, the MICE will always scatter.
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Great article.
I have always figured that Trump is only the means to an end for the billionaires, despite his fantasy plan to stay in power for a third term. Are they making their move to have him removed and Thiel's puppet Vance to step into the position of president? We know Vance is morally malleable and would help expedite the so called Dark Enlightenment doctrine of Curtis Yarvin.
I was pretty choked when Garland's DOJ failed to indict the overpaid right-wing propagandists and MAGA mercenaries who were spreading the pro-Russian anti-Ukraine drivel on social media. They were(and still are) giving aid and comfort to the enemy, also known as treason.